Open the last five CVs you sent out and count the links. Most people find four or five: LinkedIn, GitHub, a personal site, a Medium page, sometimes an X handle and a Calendly. Now count how many a recruiter has ever mentioned to you in an interview. For most office roles the honest answer is zero, and it is not because your work is uninteresting. A link is a request for extra effort, and a person working through forty applications before lunch does not grant it unless the job forces them to.
This is not about building a portfolio. That is a separate job. This is about the document: which of the addresses you already own deserve a line on one or two pages, where that line sits, and how you type it so it survives an ATS parse, a print-out and a conversion to plain text.
What a recruiter actually does with a link
Usually nothing. For an accountant, an ops manager, an HR generalist, a project manager or a sales rep, the pattern is the same. Skim the CV, form an opinion in under a minute, and if the opinion is positive, look you up on LinkedIn. Note the wording. They look you up. Often they never click your link, they type your name into the LinkedIn search bar, because they are already logged in there and the CV is open in another window.
Two situations produce a real click. The role is portfolio-driven and the work cannot be described in bullets: product and brand work, front-end, motion, illustration, data visualisation, architecture, copywriting. Or something in the CV needs verification, which is rarely the compliment it sounds like.
That second case is why an unclicked link is not a neutral object. It can be opened at a moment you did not choose. A GitHub profile whose last push was in 2023, with four forked repositories and no README anywhere, is not a demonstration of skill. It is a dated piece of evidence about how you work, handed over voluntarily. If that is what your public profile looks like, remove the link and describe the work in your bullet points, where you control the framing.
The one link that belongs on almost every CV
LinkedIn, in its short form. Not because the recruiter needs the address, but because it removes ambiguity. If you share your name with someone in the same city or the same industry, the exact profile address is the difference between being found and being confused with a stranger.
Two conditions apply. First, customise the address. The default LinkedIn URL ends in a random string of seven or eight characters that exists only because someone else took your name first. Open the public profile settings and change the last segment to your first name and last name with a hyphen, adding a middle initial or your city if it is taken. On paper, the difference between a clean twenty-five character address and a ninety-character one is the difference between one line and two.
Second, the profile has to match the document. A tidy vanity address leading to a profile that still shows a job you left in 2024 does more damage than no link at all, because now the recruiter has two versions of your history and no reason to trust either.
Which other links earn their place
- Developer. GitHub or GitLab, but only if the public profile shows recent and readable work. One pinned project with a real README beats forty abandoned repositories. If your best code sits in private company repositories and your public account is empty, leave the link off. An empty profile is an argument against you.
- Product, brand and interface work. The portfolio is the point of the application. It goes second, straight after your email, never at the bottom of page two. If the work is behind a password, say so on the CV and put the password on the same line. A recruiter will not email you to request access.
- Writer, journalist, content marketer. One address, pointing at a clips page you control. Not five links to five individual articles. If your best pieces sit behind a paywall or ran without a byline, a single page listing them is the only workable answer.
- Marketer and growth. A personal site only if it holds case studies with numbers in them. If it is a landing page with a photo and the word "storyteller", it is costing you a line.
- Academic and research. Google Scholar or ORCID. The publication list can live on a later page, but the stable identifier belongs in the contact block.
- Everyone else. LinkedIn only. That covers most finance, operations, HR, legal, administrative, logistics, healthcare and management roles, which is to say most jobs.
Cut without agonising: an X account that is not professionally active, Instagram unless the profession is visual, Calendly (reads as presumptuous), a blog with two posts from 2022, and any link to a shared drive folder.
How to type the address
Strip the scheme and the subdomain. Nobody needs to read https colon slash slash www, and the bare domain buys you a dozen characters.
Strip the tracking parameters. This is the most common mistake on the page, and it happens because people search for their own profile and copy the address out of the browser bar. What comes with it is a question mark followed by thirty or sixty characters starting with utm or trk. On paper it wraps onto a second line and looks careless. In an ATS it is worse: some parsers truncate at the question mark and store a broken address, others keep the whole string and turn your contact record into noise.
Label with the platform, not with an instruction. "LinkedIn" and then the address. Not "click here", not "check out my work".
Hyperlinked text versus the visible address
Do both. Make the text a real hyperlink so a reader on screen can click it, and make the text itself the address so it still works when the hyperlink is gone. It disappears more often than you think: a hiring manager prints the CV to read it on the train, the ATS converts the document to plain text and keeps only the display string, a coordinator screenshots page one into Slack. In each case a line reading "Portfolio" with a hidden link behind it becomes the word "Portfolio", and the address is gone for good. A visible domain survives all three, because a human can retype it.
The header and footer trap
This is the boring failure that quietly costs people interviews. Many templates, especially the ones built in Canva or InDesign, put contact details in the document header or in a floating text box in a left-hand column. A large number of ATS parsers ignore header and footer content entirely, and several read text boxes and multi-column layouts out of order or skip them. The result is a candidate record with no email, no phone number and no LinkedIn, next to a CV that plainly shows all three. Nobody tells you this happened. You simply never hear back.
Put the contact block in the body of the document, on the first lines of page one, in ordinary body text. No header, no footer, no text box, no column for that block. Be creative below it. Send a PDF by default, since it keeps the layout and the hyperlinks, and keep a .docx version with the same contact block in body text for the older systems that still parse Word more reliably.
What good looks like
The top of page one, four short lines of ordinary text:
- Marie Dupont
- Product Manager, Lyon, open to hybrid
- 06 12 34 56 78, marie.dupont at fastmail.com
- LinkedIn /in/marie-dupont, Portfolio mariedupont.com
Two links, not five. Both are hyperlinked in the PDF and both stay readable once the hyperlink is stripped. The whole block is body text, so the parser picks it up. The portfolio address is short enough to retype from a printed page without an error, and there is not a tracking parameter in sight.
Link rot and the quarterly check
Addresses break quietly. A domain expires because the card on file was replaced. A free hosting tier is discontinued and the site goes with it. A project gets set to private during a rebuild. A repository goes private when you leave the employer that owned it. Someone changes a vanity URL and forgets the CV still points at the old one.
Once a quarter, spend fifteen minutes. Open the exact file you are currently sending, not the master copy on your machine, and click every link in a private window, logged out of everything. That last detail catches the real failures, because the documents that open instantly for you often return an access request screen for a stranger.
The case for a single portfolio line
If you genuinely have a GitHub account, a Dribbble profile, a writing page and a talks page, the answer is not four lines on the CV. It is one domain, one page on it linking to the other four, and one line on the CV. You then maintain one address instead of four, you can see what visitors actually open, and you get a line of your CV back, which on a one-page document is worth about two bullet points of real evidence.
Run every remaining link through one test. If a recruiter opened it right now, logged out, on a phone, between two other applications, would it make them more likely to call you? If the honest answer is "probably neutral", it is not neutral. It is a line you are spending on nothing.